This is the course website community for the LIBR 246-11: Web 2.0 class at San Jose State University's School of Library and Information Science taught by Ellyssa Kroski.

Course Description With the advent of Web 2.0, an explosion of new social software tools has emerged enabling users to create, organize, share, and collaborate in an online space. Today’s Web users are organizing their favorite bookmarks, collaborating on shared documents, cataloging their personal collections, and sharing their information with others. This course will explore the features and functionality of Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, RSS, social bookmarking, media sharing, tagging, folksonomies and more. We will look at how libraries are implementing these various tools as well as their potential uses.

Course Objectives

• Students will comprehend major Web 2.0 concepts and theories.
• Students will learn how to utilize major Web 2.0 technologies and will participate in their use throughout the course including creating and maintaining a blog, subscribing to RSS feeds, participating in the course social network, sharing bookmarks and social media, utilizing a course tag across multiple social software applications, participating in social networking communities, creating social search tools, communicating via IM, etc.
• Students will gain an understanding about the current and potential uses of these new and emerging Web technologies in libraries.
• Students will learn about Web 2.0 best practices and develop skills which will help them evaluate these technologies in order to make solution decisions appropriate for their library.

Grading & Assignments

• Grading for the course will be based on participation level with the Web 2.0 tools, completion of the weekly activities listed below, as well as the completion of assignments including:
• Participation in weekly assignments - 40%
• Weekly blogging, commenting, and participation on the class website – 35%
• Group Projects – 20%
• Scheduled group chat via IM – 5%

Weekly Blogging Guidelines

Each week, students will be expected to blog weekly about the technology they are learning about and its implementation in libraries/by librarians. Blog posts should incorporate critical thinking about the technology based on the readings, examples of library implementations, and personal experience with the applications themselves. Although I will not specify a word count, posts should consist of more than one or two sentences.

Not Acceptable:

We learned about [X technology] this week, it's kind of cool. But I really don't get it, it's not for me.

Acceptable:

"...Truthfully, I am very surprised at how well libraries can utilize Facebook for adding photos of events, posting notices of upcoming events, putting the library’s catalog and World Cat on it. The libraries contact information and mission statement is also easy to find using the template. Because most college students use Facebook, it makes perfect sense for colleges and universities to reap the benefits by creating their own accounts. Since the students are already familiar with the application, they will be able to navigate through the site quickly and easily. Seems like a win, win one to me."

"...My head is swimming with ideas for using YouTube and flickr at my library. There are so many possibilities! I watched a YouTube video of a young patron of the Gail Borden Public Library doing a book talk about Rick Riordan’s “The Lightning Thief.” Offering the chance to be the star of a video is a great idea for getting kids excited about reading! As I brainstorm, however, one obstacle keeps cropping up: how do we respect the privacy of users/contributors if we use these social sites? If, for instance, we use a flickr page as a marketing tool to show off photos of our loyal patrons and/or staff, must we get the advance permission of each person featured in a photo? That could be a daunting task! Where I work, the children’s librarian routinely snaps digital photos of children and their parents at the weekly storytimes, then goes out of house to order print copies to give to the parents on their next library visit. Posting these pics to flickr instead might save a lot of expense and staff time, but there is that privacy issue...."

"...I really liked the part on tagging and how it is important to see what others have been doing in the same niche when choosing their categories etc. It is amazing how much we can learn, just by observing the actions of others on the Web, and then essentially duplicating those actions, but with a twist. I think this is really what marketing on the web is all about – find something that works, and make it better, or at least make it unique..."

"...I honestly didn't think Flickr and YouTube could be that useful in libraries -- I suppose I was thinking of the many times I've seen kids watching WWE or Hanna Montana on YouTube. This weeks lecture really opened my eyes to the potential these technologies can have in libraries. I can see that having enormous value for a library to post photos of book sales, programs, events, displays, and new collections...."

Homework Assignments & Due Dates

• Students will create brief blog posts to "hand in" their homework assigments when specified in the "Exercises" section for each week, and will assign a specific keyword to their posts which will be provided. These posts should only contain links to homework, weekly blogging about the technology & its implementation in libraries is a separate assignment.
• Weekly homework assignments are due by Sunday night at midnight PST unless otherwise specified.
• Weekly blogging and commenting are also due by Sunday night at midnight PST.
• There will be an Elluminate session on or around Monday, June 22nd (Week 4) when I will demo how to embed RSS feeds in a website. Attendance is not mandatory & the recording will be posted the next day.
• Group project topics are due by the end of Week 4: Sunday, June 28th at midnight. You should have chosen a group and decided on a project at this point and have emailed me your idea.
• Group projects are due by the end of Week 9, Sunday August 2nd at midnight. Note: Students will post links to their projects on the class website.
• We will hold a class chat one evening for approx. 15 minutes on the website. We will vote on when this works for everyone's schedule. Attendance is mandatory for that.
• You can see all of these deadlines on the course calendar as well - keep an eye on the calendar to see events that may be added such as class chat, etc. and feel free to add your own events such as group meetings in the class chat rooms, etc.

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